A dish that's circled in the center of a well-designed menu might seem like a special, but for restaurateur Gabriel Stulman, the choice is random. "We use circles and boxes purely because we like the way they look," he said. "Other times we use them to highlight an area of the menu we're excited about. We also use them to highlight dishes that don't exactly fit in the other categories: If something's too big to be an appetizer, or too small to be an entrée, we'll put a circle around it so that we're not forcing it into a category we don't think it belongs to."

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“We eat first with our eyes.” Or so goes the old saying, which refers to how food looks on the plate. In a restaurant, though, this takes on a new meaning, because even how a menu is written determines how we’ll approach our order. Think about it: fonts, colors, amount of space between each item, whether or not prices are printed, at what point the menu appears in the meal (some don’t show up until afterwards!), how flowery the language is… There are as many menu-writing styles as there are schools of cooking.

With the help of our own BA Foodist, Andrew Knowlton, we’ve pinned down the industry’s top menu trends along with the restaurants that exemplify them. And to better illustrate these styles for you, we asked the chefs, owners, and GMs from these restaurants to re-work our Crispy Baked Chicken Wings as if it were a dish on their own menus.

A dish that's circled in the center of a well-designed menu might seem like a special, but for restaurateur Gabriel Stulman, the choice is random. "We use circles and boxes purely because we like the way they look," he said. "Other times we use them to highlight an area of the menu we're excited about. We also use them to highlight dishes that don't exactly fit in the other categories: If something's too big to be an appetizer, or too small to be an entrée, we'll put a circle around it so that we're not forcing it into a category we don't think it belongs to."